JavaScript and DOM Compatibility
Posted by maciej on Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 at 8:01 pm

With the increasing popularity of advanced JavaScript techniques on the web (variously called web 2.0, AJAX or DHTML), we’ve decided to make a big push for JavaScript and DOM compatibility. And hey, this stuff is useful for a lot of web 1.0 sites as well. (Can you tell I’m not a fan of these buzzwords?)

We’re testing against a number of test suites, including the JavaScript test suite from Mozilla and several DOM test suites from the W3C. We won’t obsolete quirksmode.org any time soon. And we are also working to support nonstandard “DOM Level 0″ features and Firefox and mozilla quirks. But we’re making a lot of progress on this standards stuff too.

Here’s a quick update on where we stand, with the latest cvs version of WebKit:

JavaScript

Mozilla JavaScript tests    1111 total    1018 passed    91.63% success
DOM (in HTML pages)

DOM Level 1 Core (html)    238 total    226 passed    95.0% success
DOM Level 2 Core (html)    11 total1    11 passed    100% success
DOM Level 2 Events (html)    26 total    26 passed    100% success
DOM Level 2 HTML (html)    685 total    680 passed    99.3% success
DOM (in XHTML pages)

Note, this section applies only to XHTML pages served with an XHTML mime type. This doesn’t apply to most XHTML pages on the web today. But we’d to be forward-looking and so we’re doing our best to make XHTML and XML work really well in the WebKit engine.

DOM Level 1 Core    238 total    212 passed    89.1% success
DOM Level 2 Core    11 total1    7 passed    63.8% success
DOM Level 2 Events (xhtml)    26 total    26 passed    100% success
DOM Level 2 HTML (xhtml)    687 total    597 passed    86.9% success
DOM Level 3 Core (xhtml)2    708 total    78 passed    11.0% success
In closing, I’d like to add that even though we’re not yet passing all the DOM test suites, on many we are actually doing better than most other browsers, and we’re actively working to do even better.

1 - A lot of the DOM Level 2 Core tests are not available in HTML standalone versions yet - we’re working with the W3 Consorium’s QA working group on this.
2 - DOM Level 3 support is completely experimental - we haven’t really made a full-on attempt to work on it yet.